Steven Johnson of The Wall Street Journal posted this article today on how the e-book might fundamentally change the process of reading and writing (therefore changing us). I disagree that Amazon’s Kindle will be what brings e-books mass acceptance. It reminds me of a BlackBerry. Too clunky and ugly. Plus there’s the DRM issue which will hopefully go the way of iTunes DRM. Remember, e-books have been around in one form or another for a while now and have so far managed to be far from revolutionary. That said, once you can combine a DRM-free Amazon with a better e-reader, like the one being developed by Plastic Logic (still not the ideal e-reader, in my opinion, but getting close), then I think we just might start seeing people carrying their libraries around with them… but, as Johnson suggests, it will be more than that:
Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
The economics of digital books will likely change the conventions of reading and writing as well. Digital distribution makes it a simple matter to offer prospective buyers a “free sample” to entice them to purchase the whole thing. Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The “free sample” component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections, just as Dickens mastered the cliffhanger device almost two centuries before.
p.s. Here’s a side by side of the Kindle and Plastic Logic’s reader to prove my point that aesthetics will matter with e-book readers even more than they do with phones.
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Which would you rather whip out at a coffee shop?
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Peter Jurmu at http://www.creativebyline.com
David, is that picture of the Kindle 2? The buttons appear to be in the wrong places. The dimensions are still essentially the same, but the new release is significantly improved over the first. (Enough so, anyway, for O’Reilly to start selling their previously open-.mobi ebooks in the Kindle Store without DRM.) Even so, I still like the look of the Plastic Logic reader better, and Sony’s PRS-700 remains the sexiest of the lot.
Ebooks have received strange print press over the past two weeks. First, this article in the WSJ that takes a gee-whiz approach to matters that are constantly and exhaustively discussed online, usually absent from the writing of someone that embraces brevity (like Walter Mossberg, ostensibly the WSJ’s tech columnist), and then this past week a bizarre article in the New York Times‘ Fashion & Style section. An excerpt from the latter: “And as books migrate from paper, it means the death of the pickup line, ‘Oh, I see you’re reading the latest (insert highbrow title here).’”
When I read the above quote, I quickly checked the page header to make sure I was still reading the Times and hadn’t been bumped to some other site. I completely understand that, to many, ereaders fall on aesthetic, and not utilitarian (at least not until they actually fork over the money for one), concerns, but the rest of the Times‘ article is about as informative about either as that quote. Joe Wikert over at Kindleville had a good time carving a jack-o-lantern out of the expressed sentiments.
Posted at May 1, 2009 on 12:53pm.